Weekly Devotional: February 25, 2026

GOD’S WORD
Psalm 95:1-7; Ephesians 5:18b-21; Philippians 3:8; Colossians 3:16-17

The Lenten Series for this year will be excerpts from the late
Commissioner Phil Needham’s book

“Lenten Awakening”
Daily Meditations From Ash Wednesday To Easter

Devotional
"SINGING TOGETHER”

Psalm 95
Come, let us sing to the Lord!
Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come to him with thanksgiving.
Let us sing psalms
of praise to him.
For the Lord is a great God,
a great King above all gods.
He holds in his hands the
depths of the earth
and the mightiest mountains.
The sea belongs to him, for he made it.
His hands formed the dry land, too.
Come, let us worship and bow down.
Let us kneel before the Lord
our maker, for he is our God.
We are the people he watches over,
the flock under his care.
If only you would listen to his voice today!

Ephesians 5:18-21 (NLT)
Don’t be drunk with wine, because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, and making music to the Lord in your hearts. And give thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

If Christ unites His church (His Bride) in her suffering, He lifts her through her singing. Whether the songs she sings are expressions of gratitude and love to God, calls to Christlike action, or spiritual meditations, they all are grounded in the gifts and graces of God. These gifts and graces have little to nothing to do with worldly success and powerful influence in the fields of finance, business, politics, or religion. They have to do with considering “everything as loss in comparison with the spiritual value of knowing Christ Jesus [our] Lord” (Philippians 3:8). One could compose a hymn of sorts centered on hope or gratitude for material prosperity, personal recognition, self-love, or unlimited freedom, but it would have no place in Christian worship. Christian singing lifts us to God, no matter our situation in life.

We don’t know exactly how God created everything, but maybe he sang it into existence. It certainly appears we are a part of his creation that can sing back to him. So much of the Bible can and has been sung. The Psalms, for example. The psalmist invites the whole congregation to sing their gratitude to God:

Come. Let’s sing out loud to the Lord!
Let’s raise a joyful shout to the
rock of our salvation!
Let’s come before him with thanks!
Let’s shout songs of joy to him!
(Psalm 95:1-2)

Our singing together is part of the unique way we humans communicate with God.

It is also one of the ways the Spirit of God binds us together as the Body of Christ. In his letter to the Ephesian church, Paul admonishes the members to “speak to each other with songs, hymns, and spiritual songs” while they “sing and make music to the Lord in [their] hearts” and “always give thanks to God the Father in everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ…submit[ting] to each other out of respect for Christ” (Ephesians 5:19-20). These are all ways, in combination, to be filled with the Spirit (v. 18b). What is intriguing about these words is that they blend communicating with God and communicating with each other.

This book of meditations is being written while the coronavirus is infecting hundreds of thousands but has also taken the lives of tens of thousands in the USA. One of the most important protective requirements has been social distancing. Churches that remained open often faced tragic consequences. Our own pastors, staff, and volunteers offered online worship, which was helpful and much appreciated. What was missing, however, was the corporate gathering, the coming together of the bodies in the Body. There is a palpableness to gathering together and letting our hearts and voices blend to sing God’s praises as one Body. The screen cannot be the Body.

Ignatius, a latter first-century church leader, envisioned the church at worship as a choir of harmonious love for God and each other, singing with one voice to the Father through the Son. And our listening God, hearing the choir, perceives by the music and our good works that we are indeed members of his Son (Epistles of Ignatius, v.50-52).

The whole church is one great massed choir for God, singing the gospel 24/7 around the world. In fact, the singing never ends. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sing to one another, and we join in for eternity, when all of us will have beautiful singing voices and perfect pitch. And the song will never end.

For now, we are followers of Jesus Christ, the Pied Piper of this fallen world, luring it with his love song. Not some cheap, sentimental love song. No, a love song with pain and suffering and enormous sacrifice for his beloveds. A love song he is teaching us to sing so that we also can sing the story to the world.

PERSONAL PRAYER
Thank you, Lord, for a faith we can sing; for the memories that sustain us,
evoked by a song; for the music that pulls us from the clutches of defeat
and despair; for the melodies of your miraculous grace that give us what we
don’t deserve and carry us where we have no capacity to go on our own;
for the songs of your providence that see us through our pain and
our loss to a love from which nothing can separate us.
I ask you, Lord, to tune my voice to your love and my life to Jesus,
who sang to this world with his life poured out. I ask in his name. Amen.